PBX Hosted Phone/Voip System thoughts

[Tom.A]

Thinking about switching my company over to this as we are adding a new branch and it would be nice to be on the same system.
Any company you would suggest or pitfalls to look for?
Thanks in advance for your opinions.

[XcYZ]

I know what PBX is, but what is Hosted PBX?

As far as VOIP, I'd be worried about power outages, 911 coverage, etc. You could get a UPS for your local network, but you still have to consider how power outages would effect your ISP.

I know there are a lot of VOIP users, it would be interesting to see what they think.

[Reckley]

A Hosted PBX is a PBX that sits in the telephone network provider's central office or data center rather than on your premise. Rather than purchasing and maintaining your own telephone system or PBX, you can simply pay a monthly service fee and get similar features.

The legacy version of this is known as Centrex. The modern version is known as hosted VoIP. It's the same concept only hosted VoIP utilizes a server and a data network rather than telephone switch and the traditional voice network.

AT&T is always a good option but, I'm kind of biased

Mike

[Fluid Power]

I have VoIP for my business and love it. I have been using it for 7 years. The cost savings is amazing over my old PBX system. Since the phone system piggy backs on our T1 line, there has never been an issue on call clarity or dropped calls.

In the event of a power outage, log on to the portal from any smart phone or lap top and direct the call to a cell phone or land line (I have one for the fax machine, as fax machines do not work well with VoIP) and we are back in business.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Darren

If the power is out, we can't use the computer system anyways, so just being able to answers phones is enough. The VoIP saved me about $1500 a month in phone bills as there is no long distance charges on my VoIP system.

[GeoffP]

Something to consider when going with a hosted PBX service is that you are dependent on the reliability of the connectivity to the hosting company (in addition to the hosting company itself). In most cases (or at least in Georgia) you're dependent on the telco (AT&T) to provide this connectivity unless your company owns its own WAN (Wide Area Network). It's not a big deal when everything works find, but in the event of an outage you are completely dependent on the service provider to fix the problem and get your service restored. Again this isn't that big of a deal unless the service provider has multiple issues (like during a big thunderstorm). I can tell you from experience that no service provider is going to give your connectivity priority over their own especially during a large outage, so you can rest assured that you're going to get 2nd rate service at best even if the contract says the restoration requires "best effort" service. I do my best to bring as much as possible in house because I can almost always do the job of a third party cheaper and more reliably. My experience has shown that the cost savings from out sourcing almost never seem to materialize in the real world environment.

[Tom.A]

Thanks for the feed back guy's I made an appointment and have a demo next week. Our some system is small like maybe 15 phones. I did think about the ISP having problems but it seems like our building has more power outages than ISP outages and our Nortel system shut's down with no power. Thanks again

[markdavid]

Hi All,

I recommend PBX Plus (www.pbxplus.com) which is offering Virtual/Hosted PBX Services in an affordable price with so many advanced features like call forwarding, free speech recognition, voicemail and voicemail transcription, eFAX, unlimited extensions and sub-extensions etc. They offers coverage in 40 countries.

The drag and drop designer can be used to configure PBX in just 10 to 15 minutes. For a limited period they are offering a free US or UK number with unlimited minutes to your account.

I suggest you to sign-up and review the site for more features and build your phone system with unlimited trail and testing.

Pbx Plus is really awesome.